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As our own Zach Sanders astutely pointed out recently, the current state of the waiver wire, relative to quality hitting, is pretty grievous. Indeed, I find myself playing far more platoons with my offense and frequently scouring the rough in desperate search of that proverbial diamond. With this in mind, I wanted to highlight a couple players readily available in most standard formats that might be able to help your squad out: Ben Revere and Chris Johnson.

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Unless your closer’s name is Mariano Rivera, there’s a possibility he’s going to get hurt at some point during the season. Pitchers are a fragile bunch. It happens. Two teams have been hit especially hard in that area this season.

If you had told the Phillies and Dodgers at the start of the season that their closers on June 30th would be Antonio Bastardo and Javy Guerra you’d have been laughed out of the building by Ruben Amaro and Ned Colletti. Yet, here we are. The two teams haven’t needed their star closers much; the Phillies would be in first with me at the back of their pen, and the Dodgers just aren’t good enough for an elite closer to matter. But, to the fantasy consumer, they mean plenty. Let’s take a look at the two new faces.

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I really feel for you deep leaguers. Every week I get so excited to uncover those hidden gems, but I feel like maybe I am looking in the wrong cave. I keep just finding piles of dirt. Yeah, so I don’t know where I am going with this, but maybe these dudes could help you.

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On Monday, I looked at the five hitters with the highest percentage of “Just Enough” (JE) home runs according to ESPN Home Run Tracker. Today, I will look at the other side of the coin, those hitters who have posted the lowest percentage of JE home runs, with a minimum of 10. The minimum is just to ensure our sample size isn’t too small. As a reminder, the latest data we are given for the league average JE percentage is 27% back in 2006. As such, we should expect these hitters to see an increased numbers of home runs that just get over the wall, leading to a rise in HR/FB ratio, all else equal.

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It’s a rare thing these days when success by a shortstop goes under-reported. I’ve beaten you all over the head with the fact that the position is the weakest it’s been in some time. Asdrubal Cabrera came out of nowhere to surprise people this season and has gotten a lot of burn in the fantasy world because of it.

Another American League Central shortstop is having a very nice season after spending the past two living in fantasy irrelevance. Without much fanfare Jhonny Peralta is having the best season of his career.

Aside from his 2005 season with Cleveland in which he hit 24 home runs and put up a .376 wOBA, Peralta has had a pretty up and down career. His fantasy value outweighed his real life value, especially if you don’t play in an OBP league (though I think everyone should). The 2006 campaign was a disaster. Peralta hit .257, even though he had a .327 BABIP, with just 13 home runs and 68 RBI. He looked to have bounced back in 2007 and 2008, averaging 22 home runs, 80 RBI, and a .273/.336/.451 triple slash line. Things were looking up. Then the past two seasons happened.

Peralta still put up good RBI numbers, 83 and 81 respectively, but his hits, runs, home runs were all significantly down, as were his batting average, on base percentage and slugging percentages. His ISO, a better indication of a hitter’s pure power, which was .228 in 2005 and .197 in 2008 dropped to .120 and .143 in 2009 and 2010. He hit 26 total home runs in those two seasons after averaging 22 in the two seasons prior. It’s tough to pinpoint exactly what Peralta was doing wrong without taking a few liberties.

His BABIP fell every year from 2005-2010, but only dipped below .300 in the 2010 season. Wild fluctuations in his 2009-2010 batted ball data surely doesn’t help. It’s hard to know what you’re going to get when your data looks like this

This season, however, Peralta seems to have found it again. His BABIP is up to .321, he’s hitting nearly .300 and already has 11 home runs. He’s hitting far more fly balls than he ever has. Last season’s FB% of 43.4% was the highest of his career by 7%, and he’s at 48.2% this year. It’s hard to look at any specific set of data and determine why that change has occurred. That’s usually the outcome of a change in a player’s swing, but I couldn’t find anything when Googling. I don’t put too much importance on these numbers yet, but he’s swinging at fewer pitches in the zone (68.5%) than he has in the past four seasons. He’s also making contact with more pitches overall (81.2%) and more pitches in the zone than he ever has (90.6%). His O-Swing% hasn’t changed drastically, which is why I caution you in putting a ton of faith in those numbers going forward.

Last season Peralta finished ranked 297th overall. To this point he’s sitting at 93rd. A stark improvement. You likely got him fairly cheaply in your leagues, and the man with the funny name is paying dividends thus far.

Recently, I published an article here at Fangraphs listing a few pitchers returning from the DL and their fastball speeds. One commenter, Eddie from NYC, noted:

Matusz has had exactly ONE start in 2011. Drawing any conclusion from one start is waay premature …. If his velocity stays at high 80s, yes, we should be concerned, but he’s only had one start.

I could not find via the interwebs how a pitcher’s fastball velocity in their first appearance back from the DL compares to their velocity the rest of the season. So I did a little research.

Some pitchers have made a living throwing slower, but generally the faster you throw the better you perform. As Mike Fast noted at the Hardball Times, starters expect their RA/9 innings to increase by ~0.25 for every 1 MPH decrease in fastball speed. The increase is ~0.40 RA/9 for relievers. Besides seeing an increase in ERA, the pitcher’s strike out rate decreases as their fastball speed goes down. So faster equals better for these purposes.

To get the needed data, I looked at pitchers that returned from the DL in 2010. I wanted to see how their fastball speed from a few appearances or starts (1 or 3) could help predict their fastball speed later in the season. I looked at pitchers that returned from the DL and made at least 6 starts or appearances over the rest of the season -or- before they went on the DL again (K-Dice, I am looking at you).

Originally, I planned on looking at all the pitchers returning from the DL, but the values effectively became unchanged after 25 samples (even though I did double that number). I will later finish collecting all the data later as I have 300 pitchers to go through and it takes 2-3 minutes each pitcher to collect the needed data. I try to have some kind of life outside of my basement.

Here are the results from the data I have collected so far:

Initial Game
Top Value (Initial Game Average – Season Average): 2.33 MPH
Average Speed: 0.15 MPH
Lowest Value: -1.75 MPH
StdDev: 0.80 MPH

3 Game Average
Highest (Initial 3 Game Average – Season Average): 1.04 MPH
Average Speed: -0.06 MPH
Lowest: -1.45 MPH
StdDev: 0.55 MPH

The overall average fastball speed is not much higher in the first start compared to the rest of the season. Pitchers don’t really see a bump up or down in speed as the season goes on compared to their first few games.

The spread in values are smaller after having 3 games worth of data than after 1 game. With only 1 game, the Standard Deviation (SD) is 0.80 MPH, but it is 0.55 MPH after 3 games. For those without knowledge on advanced statistics, 68% of all values will be within 1 SD and 95% of values will be within 2 SDs on statistics that are normally distributed.

For example, in his first game back Brian Matusz averaged 86.6 MPH. So there is a 68% chance that his fastball speed over the rest of the season would be between 86.6 +/- 0.8 MPH (85.8 to 87.4) or 95% of the time between 86.6 +/- 1.6 MPH. He has actually maintained the average of 86.6 MPH over the season so far. The effects from the ~3 MPH decrease from last season can be seen in a career high ERA of 5.60 which weirdly matches his current and career low K/9 of also 5.60.

As a general rule, one game of fastball speeds gives some useful information, but after 3 games a pitcher is generally throwing within 1 MPH of what they will average the rest of the season.

Very few fantasy players come with more risk than Mark Reynolds. His strengths can be great, but his flaws can completely tank your fantasy team. This made Reynolds one of the more controversial selection in drafts this season. Last season, Reynolds already troublesome K-rate exploded to 42.3%. As a result, Reynolds couldn’t even hit above the Mendoza Line. This season, however, has been a completely different story. Reynolds has actually cut his K-rate to the lowest level of his career (32.9%). Despite that improvement, Reynolds overall numbers don’t appear all that much different from last season. What gives?
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ESPN Home Run Tracker (formerly HitTrackerOnline) is a great resource I feel has been very underutilized. For those not familiar with the site, it measures the distance of every home run hit and then categorizes them based on how far past the fence they flew. Last year I studied previous seasons to see what kind of predictive value home run distances have. I found that the hitters who hit a high percentage of “Just Enough” home runs (league average from 2006 was 27%, no updated data available) saw their HR/FB ratios decline by 21% the following year, versus 11% for the hitters who had hit the lowest percentage of Just Enough home runs. The process passes the sniff test as well, so below are the five hitters with the highest percentage of Just Enough home runs, while hitting a minimum of 10 home runs.

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Middle relievers tend to get hurt and/or be ineffective no apparent reason, creating an opening for other guys in the bullpen to get more leveraged work. It happens all the time, and taking advantage of situations like that are a necessity in fantasy these days. That applies to saves mostly, but we can’t forget about holds as well.  Here’s three guys that recently climbed a notch or two on the depth chart thanks to some hobbled teammates…

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